(PS2-50) The Impact of Negative Social Feedback on Brain Activity in Social Anxiety Disorder: A Fmri Study

Identifying the neural mechanisms underlying social anxiety disorder (SAD) may provide data-driven insights into disorder etiology and maintenance. The cingulate gyrus has received interest recently as a potential region of significance related to monitoring and alerting to unexpected events. This may be particularly relevant in SAD, which may uniquely be impacted by intolerance of uncertainty, or distress stemming from unpredictable outcomes. The cingulate gyrus includes the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which can be further divided into the rostral ACC (rACC) and dorsal ACC (dACC). In particular, the rACC is implicated in emotional processing and is physically connected to subcortical and cortical processing units including the insula, amygdala and ventral striatum. Prior EEG research has revealed that rACC activity is decreased when individuals perform a task accurately, whereas rACC activity may be elevated during the commission of errors. The present study aimed to use an fMRI dataset of adults diagnosed with SAD without comorbid depression (n = 21, age = 25.67, SD = 7.61, 8 females, 13 males) as well as age-, sex- and IQ-matched non anxious controls (n = 22, age =26.50, SD = 7.98, 10 females, 13 males). We used the Monetary Incentive Delay task to investigate evoked responses in rACC activity during error commission in a social reaction-time task. During fMRI, p</span>articipants viewed an otherwise arbitrary stimulus (square or triangle), followed by a target which remained for 300ms. During “win” trials, a button press during the target period resulted in a ‘hit’, meaning that participants could either win $1 or view a happy face. A miss resulted in a letter “X” being displayed on the screen.  During “loss” trials, a hit resulted in a check mark, whereas a miss resulted in losing a dollar or viewing an angry face.   Results from this study will focus on rACC responses to hits and misses in win and loss trials, with the hypothesis that evoked responses to miss trials in rACC will be more pronounced in SAD, corresponding to enhanced error monitoring during loss (social) trials. Preliminary analyses suggest that differential neural mechanisms between SAD and healthy controls may clarify whether and how error commission may differentially impact persons with SAD, which may be translated to behavioral interventions and functional behavioral analyses of how feedback impacts SAD.